Distress Signal
by Xvern
Summary: "Hello? Anyone? I'm trapped in the jewelry safe in Fallons. If anyone is out there, please, help. What's going on out there? I felt the ground shake and nothing since. It's been... four days, I think. If you can hear this, please, let me out. There's a button underneath one of the counters in the jewelry department. Please... I'm so thirsty. Please... hurry."


_**A/N:** In Fallout 4, there is a radio station you can find in the wasteland called, simply "Distress Signal". Finding this, you can hear a short audio bit of a woman in trouble in the ruins of a Pre-War mall called Fallons. And, well, I didn't exactly like how it turned out. So... this is my alternative ending. At the very end, I will put in what actually happens._

[=_=_=_=]

" _Hello? Anyone? I'm trapped in the jewelry safe in Fallons. If anyone is out there, please, help. What's going on out there? I felt the ground shake and nothing since. It's been... four days, I think. If you can hear this, please, let me out. There's a button underneath one of the counters in the jewelry department. Please... I'm so thirsty. Please... hurry."_

Beginning calm, the voice grew more and more hysterical toward the end. After the last of the "hurry," a computerized male voice informed the listener that the message was prerecorded and that it would replay in three seconds. Once inside the mall, however, the lone Power Armored human cared little about how long it would take for the message to repeat. Admittedly, this may have been because he had also had playing for the last fifteen to twenty minutes.

Still, inside a building crawling with large, green Super Mutants, the mental stability of a woman locked in relative safety.

"You fight well! ...for a human!" roared one such Super Mutant, laughing as he sent a hail of bullets at the armored human. The man flinched as a bullet bounced off the pauldron of his armor. When the hail ceased, he popped out of cover and fired a trio of laser shots into the Mutant. Howling in pain, the once-human collapsed forward, flipping over the second story railing and falling to the floor a couple feet from the human.

With the assurance of his T-45 Power Armor, the man stepped out from cover and advanced further into the mall, past the handful of bodies of Super Mutants and Mutant Hounds that he had also slain. Of course, he heard the rallying calls of Mutants further into the mall but, as he heard the distressed woman over his helmet's speakers once more, he steeled his resolve and moved without fear.

"You die now!" screamed a Mutant, accentuating his claim with a hail of 5mm rounds.

"Shit!" the human reflexively cursed as he threw himself behind a waist-high wall. Of course, what would normally be a waist-high wall was turned into a mid-thigh high wall in Power Armor. As such, he was laying on his back, watching the wall be slowly chewed apart by the Minigun's wall of bullets. Reaching to his waist, he pulled a grenade from a leather holder around his waist and held it close to his chest. A couple seconds later, the hail stepped. Ripping the pin from the device, he tossed it over the wall in the general direction of the Mutant.

"Look out!" it roared just before the ground shook from the grenade's detonation. Within his helmet, the human registered it only as a dull thump, though he felt the concussive force of the explosion within his chest. Not dwelling on small facts as these, however, he popped up into a sitting position with the Laser Rifle to his shoulder. Spotting the distorted, bleeding, but stubbornly still alive Super Mutant, the human rapidly pulled the trigger on his rifle until it fired no more.

Now covered in laser burn marks and bleeding all over it's body, the Super Mutant collapsed.

"Human!"

"Over here!"

"One of us will die and it won't be me!"

Hearing the shouts of maybe a half dozen, at least, Super Mutants, the Power Armored human dumped his Laser Rifle. Scrambling to his feet, he jumped over the wall and bolted to the recently slain Super Mutant. Skidding to a halt, the man scooped up the Minigun, taking a second to comprehend the tri-bayonet mounted on a housing that covered the barrels.

"Found you!"

Squeezing the double trigger mechanism, the man heard the Minigun whir and... click.

"Fuck!" he screamed as he backpedaled into the store the Minigun toting Super Mutant had come out of. Mutants and their Hounds were pouring from the other part of the mall now, the Mutants with weapons laying a wall of metal to cover their melee inclined brethren. Ripping out the back of the canister, he spun the container to the next module and slammed it back into the weapon. He looked up just in time to see a Mutant Hound only feet in front of him.

Thrusting the Minigun forward, he stuck the tri-bayonet into the beast and activated the weapon. The creature's head was completely torn asunder in a short three second burst. Kicking off the corpse with a wicked smile, the human aimed at the approaching Mutant force.

"Come and get some motherfuckers!" he screamed.

[=_=_=_=]

With a hiss of broken hydraulics, the human descended the broken escalator. Because of the broken hydrualic, he did so with a limp. With no weapon in his hands, the Minigun having been discarded back on the ground floor, he prayed that there were no more Mutants waiting for him in this basement area.

Lucky for him, if there were any down here, they had rushed up top to fight him. As well, he had found the jewelry section of the mall. Having turned off the distress signal, hearing the voice again, even though faint, told him that he was in the right place. Following the voice, he found himself in front of a bookcase. Smiling at how stereotypical it was for the secret safe to be behind the bookcase, he set about trying to find the button.

Just like the woman had said, he found it underneath a counter at the back of the store. With the loud hissing of punished hydraulics, he knelt down and pressed the button. Standing up, he began to walk back over to the bookcase as it swung open. After the wall behind it also slid open, the human paused halfway back to the safe.

What came out of the safe was a Ghoulified woman dressed in a tattered and dirt pink dress. Her hair was almost gone and her nose was entirely missing. She stumbled out of the safe with a hunched posture, similar to a Feral.

"The recording was right after the bomb went off," the human whispered in disbelief, his hand settling atop the 10mm strapped to his thigh plate all the same. Hearing him, the Ghoul turned to him and began to shamble over, her nearly glossed over eyes locking onto his chest plate.

"I thought that you'd just be a pile of bones," he stated softly, letting the Ghoul get closer. In the background, he could hear her message.

" _-Please, let me out-"_

The Ghoul got closer. As she did, the human picked up that her mouth was moving up and down. She was trying to talk.

" _-Please... I'm so thirsty-"_

By now the Ghoul was grabbing onto the chest piece of the stunned human. It looked up into the emotionless visor that stared down at it and, finally, the human within could make out what she was saying.

" _Please-"_

"Kill me," she growled, "Kill me. P-please, kill me."

Over and over, she repeated those three words to the metal statue on which her hands held onto. With the soft noise of metal sliding on leather, the man drew his pistol. Slowly, he raised it so that it was pointed at the side of the Ghoul's head. Just as slowly, she looked into the abyss of the barrel with those glossy eyes before looking back into that emotionless visor.

"Tha-"

The report from the pistol drowned out the rest of what she was going to say and the bullet that tore through her skull ensured that she could never finish. The woman, ravaged by nuclear fallout brought by a war decades old, crumpled to the ground under the eyes of that emotionless visor.

[=_=_=_=]

 _ **A/N:** So, now that you've read that, I would like to inform you that within the actual game, the place **is** crawling with Super Mutants. However, upon opening the safe, you discover that not only is the lady just a skeleton in a pink dress, but that a group called The Railroad had established a supply cache with the safe._

 _I don't know if the cache of ammo and weapons was supposed to be Bethesda rewarding you for following a Distress Signal into a Super Mutant den. Especially since it take only a moment of clear thought to realize that the person who recorded it is probably long dead._

 _However, I feel that Bethesda missed the opportunity to play deeper into the human psyche. While I understand that my scenario may be a bit too animated and cut-scene like for Fallout, I still think that the woman should have been Ghoulified and on the verge of turning Feral upon her discovery. She survived the nuclear bomb that went off mere miles from the mall but dehydration was what killed her?_

…

 _Now I'm just ranting. What done was done and I can't change how the "quest" ends._

 _Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this little short story of mine and thanks for reading it._


End file.
